Marketers are constantly searching for ways to reach target groups of people. This is often done through advertising, promotional materials, contests, product giveaways, coupons, and various other ways. Marketers often have target demographics of users that they want to reach, which may include criteria related to age, gender, income level, social circles, past purchase history, geographic location, and so forth. Online and other types of advertising often take steps to reach a particular target audience. For example, web-based search advertising uses the keywords of a query to determine interests of a user, and may use a stored user profile to obtain further information about the user for targeting displayed advertisements. In this way, advertising systems can display advertisements that are relevant to the user in general and that are relevant to the user's current topic of interest.
It is also common for people to have idle time during which they are willing to be entertained, educated, and will readily accept some level of marketing in return for the entertainment or education. A common example is trivia questions that are displayed in movie theaters before a movie starts. This is idle time for most people, and the theater can display advertisements along with questions for the crowd to think about or fun facts that are memorable to the crowd waiting to see the movie. The theater knows some information about the people based on what movie they are waiting to see (e.g., a family movie and an action movie attract different demographics). Often such advertising is done through static displays, such as a displayed logo on the screen, the cups, and other merchandise that people purchase, and so on.
However, there is not a unified way to dynamically reach people in such crowds. While waiting for live events to take place, such as a movie, concert, or sporting event there is an opportunity to engage the audience for education or advertising. You can see this today with the multimedia slide shows or videos before a movie that provide programming and advertisements or the half-time or mid-inning programming on the scoreboards for sporting events. While entertaining, these are not typically as engaging as the types of entertainment found on their phones or other mobile devices. Users today are spending more and more time reading information (e.g., checking email or social networks) on their mobile devices during such idle time than engaging in the venue activities.